We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida is a compelling novel about a teenage girl and her friendship group and the community in which they live. I was looking forward to reading it as she is one of my favourite authors and I wasn't disappointed.

I'm new to Vida's writing, having read the brilliant The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty a month or so ago, but since then I've devoured Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and now this, her latest novel. There's something so fresh and exciting about her writing. You know the excitement that comes with finding a writer whose writing and plot lines totally gel with your wants and expectations? That's what I get with Vendela Vida's novels.

We Run The Tides is a coming of age story set in 1980s Sea Cliff, San Francisco. Eulabee, spends her days on the beach scrambling up rocks with her band of pals from private school: the most beautiful and captivating of which is Maria Fabiola. Eulabee (and everyone else in town) is enamoured of Maria Fabiola, and the girls are thick as thieves. Until one day, when a misunderstanding happens, and Eulabee is ostracised by her friends, with a chain of results ultimately resulting in Maria Fabiola going missing. It soon transpires that Maria has a more sinister side than many people realise, and the rest of the novel follows the fall-out of her disappearance.

The 1980s and the neighbourhood the girls live in felt perfectly evoked, as did the awkwardness and angst of being a teenage girl. This felt slightly more conventional than the other two novels I've read by the author but this isn't a criticism. I think the only tiny niggly letdown for me was that some of the dialogue between the girls felt like it was more like conversation between grown women, but I let this slide given how much I enjoyed everything else that was going on. Recommended!

I loved this book! This is a coming of age story of friendship set in San Fransisco in the 1980s. I adored the audacious, unflinching and courageous behaviour of the group, Vendela Vida has a wonderful gift of writing from the perspective of 13 year old girls with such honesty and transparency. A must read!

There is always one girl in a year group who casts a spell over everyone and you can't quite work out why. People do things for her when they know they shouldn't and yet she always seems to get away with it. In this very enjoyable book a girl questions the actions of that popular girl a little more than the rest of her friends, resulting in unintended consequences. The politics of school and friendship are beautifully described; the pain of being ostracised, the confusion of first sexual experiences and the conflict between truth and popularity as a teen girl.

I appreciated the ending; the penny dropping all those years later as to what was really going on was satisfying and realistic - I still gets moments of clarity thirty five years since I was last a teenager when it suddenly dawns on me why someone behaved in a certain way.

A top read.

It’s the middle of the 80s and San Francisco hasn’t turned into the tech/IT hotspot it is today. Teenager Eulabee grows up in a more well-off part close to the beach and attends an expensive all-girls school with her best friends Maria Fabiola. The girls are still somewhere between being kids and becoming visibly female and with this transformation also come the problems. Maria Fabiola is the first to attract attention from the opposite sex, but her radiant appearance also charms women which is why she gets away with almost everything. Eulabee is far from being that self-confident and therefore sticks to the truth what leads to her being excluded from the girl circles of her school. When Maria Fabiola vanishes, the whole community is alarmed, but Eulabee from the start does not believe in a kidnapping, she has known Maria Fabiola for too long and is well aware of her former friend’s greed for attention.

Vendela Vida still isn’t as renowned as her husband Dave Eggers even though she has published several books by now and has won the Kate Chopin Award. I found her last novel “The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty” quite exceptional in the choice of perspective and therefore was eager to read her latest novel “We Run the Tides”. This time, she goes back in time and has chosen teenage girls as protagonists. The story is told from Eulabee’s perspective and captures well the mixed emotions a girl goes through when becoming a woman. Also the ambiance of the 1980s is convincingly depicted.

The most central aspect of the novel is surely the friendship between Eulabee and Maria Fabiola and its shift when one of the girls develops a bit quicker than the other. Maria Fabiola is well aware of the effect she has on other people and uses this for her own advantage. Eulabee, in contrast, is still much more a girl, insecure in how to behave and what to do about the situation. She does not fight but accept what’s happening. Her first attempts of approaching boys seem to be successful but end up in total disappointment. She is a close observer and can well interpret the relationships she sees, between her parents, her mother and her sister and also the other girls and teachers at her school. Without any doubt she is a likeable character and treated highly unfairly. But that’s how kids behave at times.

I liked how the plot developed and how the vanishing of the girls turned out quite unexpectedly. Yet, I didn’t fully understand why the author has chosen to add another chapter set in the present. For me, the story was perfectly told at a certain point and admittedly, neither was I really interested in Eulabee’s later life nor in another encounter of the two women as grown-ups. Still, I do not really know what to make of Maria Fabiola when they meet for the first time decades later.

To sum up, wonderfully narrated, a great coming-of-age story with a strong protagonist.